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Monday, February 17, 2014

Love Crime, a movie I hadn’t heard of before, and probably
never would have watched were in not for the American version having just come
out via Netflix’s powerful stream, and even then I maybe would have watched it
for Noomi Rapace, who is an amazing actress, but it wasn’t until I saw that
Brian DePalma directed it that I knew I was going to check it out.

Brian DePalma’s movies are not what
they used to be, that’s for sure, but no one’s perfect, and the longer your
career the bigger your odds of making a stinker are. He’s made some classics,
so for every Snake Eyes, The Black Dahlia, or Bonfire of the Vanities, there’s
Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Femme Fatale, and Raising Cain, to name a few of
his good ones. Of course the poor ones are the most recent but none of them
will make me avoid one of his movies (even though I should have avoided The
Black Dahlia, that movie was really bad).

I digress, for I did not see his
version first, instead I saw the French version.

I’ve had a thing for Kristin Scott
Thomas ever since Four Weddings and a Funeral, I always thought she was
attractive in an older woman “British” type of way. She is even now still
attractive, or can be. She is not attractive in this movie, which threw me off.
I think it was her acting; she was really just so good as the bitch boss that I
didn’t like her – like, at all. Her toying with her assistant was kind of funny
in the way that things are funny when they happen to someone else and not
yourself, but still it was weird seeing Kristin Scott Thomas being like that.
It wasn’t cool, like David Hyde Pierce acting against type, it was a betrayal!
KST (as I’m sure she’d be okay with me calling her) is always nice and sexy,
never mean! There's nothing sexy about a mean KST! The other girl, though . . . well, mean or nice, Ludivine Sagnier is sexy no matter what her attitude is.

I looked her up and found that I had seen
The Devil’s Double, Swimming Pool, Mesrine, and A Monster in Paris (voice), all
with her in them. I don’t recall her in those movies (Swimming Pool my wife and
I saw many years ago, and I vaguely remember her as the girl the older woman is
fascinated by but not very well), but I should because she is an amazing
actress.

The two women may share the picture
for this movie but this movie is entirely Ludivine’s. Her character’s change is
believable, as a quiet trusting girl who is continually pushed by her cut
throat boss, she changes into someone who decides to look out for herself and
do whatever she can to get ahead. Things don’t go too smoothly for her at first
which is one reason to keep watching, because you don’t know if what she does
to try and get the upper hand will work or just make her boss even more pissed
at her.

I didn’t think it would go in the
direction it went about halfway through the movie, and things continued to
happen that made me wonder what the plan was, but the pay off was well worth
it. To go through the time we did with her character, all the while wondering
what her plan was, to the point that you almost start to doubt that there
really is a plan at all – and then you finally get the reward and it is pretty
fun and worth the wait.

Then the movie ends, and the last five minutes of the movie, just
about ruin the whole thing. Another development that kind of gets resolved but
why!? Why is it even there? Why did that need to happen? It really almost
ruined the whole movie for me, to me it negated everything that she had gone
through and made her change totally pointless.

The movie
was well done, and I can see DePalma’s interest in it as it is a good base for
the kind of stories that he tells; even with his recent history with his movies,
I’m anxious to see what he does with a remake of this movie.